Hackintosh disaster recovery part 2

In part one I looked at the steps I took to get my hackintosh working again after accidentally overwriting the boot information. The computer has been working fine for over three weeks since, and I haven’t found any side effects with software or hardware. My latest efforts have been focused on making bootable backups for use in the event of an unbootable hackintosh.

Hackintosh disaster recovery part 1

If you use a Mac, making bootable backups are easy, and definitely easier than on a Windows Computer. Using software like Carbon Copy Cloner or Superduper you can clone your Mac’s hard drive to another internal or external USB/Firewire drive. This copy is an exact image of the original drive so you can boot from it and see no difference to using the source drive. Add in smart copies that only copy the changes since the last backup and you have a fast, reliable and easy backup system. Scheduled backups even mean you don’t have to remember to backup, just check it’s working as planed.

I used this method with my Macbook and felt a lot more relaxed making big changes to the system. Updating to 10.5.2 was easily reversible when the wireless networking stopped working. Even the Leopard upgrade from Tiger was no problem when I could easily revert to Tiger if a show stopper surfaced. This ease is one of the factors that made me move my daily computer use to Mac OS, but what happens when you build your own?

10.5.2 is finally here

I know it’s only a software update, but this one has enough bug fixes and tweaks to justify a service pack 1 title. 10.5.2 is now available in software update as a substantial 341Mb download. Good job software update supports resuming as I would hate to get 99% of this and have to start again. I’ve stopped all other internet traffic on my network so I can get this asap, but it’s still a relatively slow download. More news on the changes once it’s installed, and don’t forget to back up all your valuable data before updating. I ran Superduper this morning so I have a bootable backup waiting if there are any problems.

Time Capsule first look

The recently announced Time Capsule wireless router/NAS is due in February (in the UK) for £199 (500Gb) and £329 (1Tb). It’s stated to work with Macs using Time Machine and Windows PC’s as a shared drive, but there’s little info as yet on the interface and access controls. The current Airport Extreme offers users accounts with passwords for restricted access to files and folders, so Time Capsule should offer at least this.
Apple’s usual ease of use is pretty much a given, but does the package offer good value for money? A 500Gb Network Attached Storage box can be bought for £146.86 here. That leaves £53 for a wireless router. You can get a cheap ’super G’ box for £20.56 here, but that’s not Draft-N standard. I couldn’t find any Draft-N routers that cheap, so the 500Gb Time Capsule at £199 looks like good value.
But what about the 1Tb version? The price difference between a bare 500Gb and 1Tb SATA hard drive is around £120 at the moment, but that’s for a standard drive. Apple states the Time Capsule contains a ’server grade’ hard drive, so while the 1Tb Time Capsule doesn’t offer the same cost per Mb as the 500Mb unit, it is competitively priced.
Hopefully these boxes will encourage home users to start taking backups a bit more seriously. It’s fine having a computer that makes it easy to store thousands of songs and photo’s, and hundreds of hours of video, but the more it stores the bigger the shock when it all gets lost.